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Archive for December, 2006

Perhaps you’ve just started a small business. Or maybe you work for an established and reputable corporation. How can you promote your company? How can you convey that you provide services and/or goods that outshine all of your competitors?
Lying is the obvious answer, but let’s pretend you’re ethical.

Al’s Alerts, a web application (http://alsalerts.com).
Al’s Alerts is a service that will email you posts from craigslist whenever a post appears with the keywords you provide. This frees you from having to check craigslist every day if you are on the lookout for something specific. This is an improvement on craigslist’s subscriptions, which will simply […]

Pictures from my road trip [facebook.com]
I took the AmTrak train to Chicago, flew to San Francisco, took a bus to Portland, then flew home. About a week before, I flew to DC for a job interview, and also stayed with my grandfather in Pennsylvania.

I was hired on the staff of the Daily Texan during college. I drew Big Science and Proverbs (for which, unlikely enough, I won an award for from Columbia University). In my opinion, they’re terrible. I’ve posted some of the less awful ones, with commentary I made several months back.
Big Science [download all comics]
Proverbs [download […]

Originally ran in the Daily Texan [dailytexanonline.com] on 8/30/04.
Rethinking our false security
Cameras poor solution to defend high-profile areas
By Al Sweigart
Clues for finding the culprits behind the recent MLK vandalism are limited to grainy footage from the two cameras by the statue. The tapes are only able to confirm that two bipedal figures indeed defaced […]

I rigged up some software to take a screenshot of my computer and a picture from my webcam at regular intervals, then composed them into a movie. The first video is finishing up the timelapse software itself (some of it uses PHP scripts to do image editing) and the second is of me going through […]

Email Al Sweigart [email protected]
CoffeeGhost is Albert Sweigart (but you can call him Al), a software developer in San Francisco, California who enjoys bicycling, reading, volunteering, network security, haunting coffee shops, and making useful software.
He is originally from Houston, Texas and went to school in Austin. He finally put his UT Austin computer science degree in […]

The image was engraved on Pioneer 10 and 11, which were probes launched into deep space. The idea was that intelligent alien life would find these plaques and interpret them to mean that intelligent life (us) existed elsewhere in the galaxy.
I offer an alternative interpretation.